Non-Rhyming poetry - legitimate or not?

Great Debates
41

aynrandlover, I’m grinning as I type this, because I have learned to respect you and your opinion here on the SDMB (I’ve been following the “how we know what we know” thread with interest and difficulty). I suspect, therefore, that you and I will agree far more than we disagree, and I think we might be nitpicking one another’s semantics, here. That said, I’ll attempt to clarify.

Well, sort of yes and no. True, there’s no single vanishing point, as in “conventional” artwork. The cubist painter disassembles the subject and reconstitutes it in a form that allows the viewer to perceive it from multiple perspectives simultaneously. I would argue that, by doing so, perspective is not “gone,” it is in fact brought to the fore, in that it’s the very lack of conventional perspective that’s being treated. I suggest that in looking at such a work, one first perceives it holistically, and subconsciously reacts against its nonrepresentation; then one views it reductively, i.e. pulling apart the various perspectives to figure out what the hell it is; then, having done that, one can then re-synthesize the artwork and view it holistically again, this time with a more complete understanding of its intent. Clearer?

Oh, I’m totally with you there. If it seemed I was suggesting that formal utilization of meter and structure makes a poem “better” or “more valuable” than one that doesn’t, then I apologize. “Ring Around the Rosey” is certainly not a better poem than, say, Sylvia Plath’s “Fever 102.” I was simply saying that artistic sparks really fly when the work occurs at the point of collision between formalism/tradition and violation/exploration, but that for this to happen, the artist must be aware of which conventions he/she is breaking. To reiterate what I said before, Picasso could draw.

Well, again, I’d go back to the holistic/reductionist/holistic behavior described above with respect to perceiving a cubist work. One can certainly enjoy and appreciate Hamlet or Bach or, oh, Le Corbusier, without knowing anything about meter or fugue form or theories of proportion. I’m arguing that you can go beyond the initial holistic perception and get added meaning out of the work, which is then synthesized back into an overall understanding. When I read or listen to Shakespeare, I’m not consciously counting syllables. I’ve just done so much work with it, it’s sort of a subtle undercurrent that feeds into my appreciation on a subliminal level. Ditto for Bach: You can enjoy the beauty of his melody and orchestration. If you want, you then can look at the mathematical and structural rigor with which the music is built. If you spend enough time studying it, it becomes second-nature, and you can then go back and enjoy the music on multiple levels. I’m not saying the beauty is the structure, I’m saying the beauty is enhanced by the structure, and an awareness and familiarity with this can increase one’s appreciation of the overall beauty of the work, as a whole.

Does this make more sense?

42

cervaise"Does this make sense?"
Yes. :slight_smile:

Thanks for the compliment, BTW, it’s my first! Usually I’m much less rational :wink: Yeah, that thread is really starting to give me indigestion.

What I’m missing, though, is your opinion on the matter of necessity here. You seem to lean on the side that a good poem does not outright require formalism, but it can be heightened by it. If so, then we are in complete agreement. Nary a peep more there.
As well, I would say that cubism put a third dimension in perspective that previous artists merely faked, but I ain’t no fan of it ;).

Maeglin, I would agree that there is a poetic continuity of sorts just like there wasn’t, one day, modern english. The language grew over time and was continuous (if not differentiable [sub]math humor, sheesh[/sub]). But again, continuity doesn’t imply necessity.
I, for example, am very fond of alliteration over strict meter in my free verse. I suppose it also depends on what you mean by structure. Is it corny to write a poem in the shape of a snake when discussing sexuality from a garden-of-eden perspective? Or in the shape of an hourglass when discussing being immersed in tim’s shadow? At what point do we stop considering structure?
This also, IMO, equates with disregarding nihilism (of which I am no fan) simply because it denies meaning. “That’s not a philosohpy.” Yes, it is.
And this is a poem:

A man said to the universe,
“Sir, I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
"That fact does not instill in me
“A sense of obligation.”

Now, any Steven Crane fans may correct whatever sentences I messed up there and move the sentence around, but you’ll find no pattern there, and you’d be very hard pressed to find an English prof who didn’t consider this a poem.

43

stofsky wrote:

You have precisely missed my point. Rhyme and meter are there in the language, whether you are in control of them or not. They will have an effect on your poem, whether you are aware of what effect they have or not. They are natural to the language, the medium of poetry. The art of poetry is to be in control of them.

I haven’t argued for form' yet. I've argued for the need for the poet to be in control of meter. Whitman's free verse didn't follow form’, but he was clearly conscious of the beat of his verse. Not all poetry will have a `form’, but it will have some kind of rhythm.

Alan Smithee wrote:

I have been too loose with the lingo, and I won’t be so herein. But I don’t think this is what stofsky is objecting to. The jump between meter' and form’ is a lot bigger than that between rhythm' and meter’.

aynrandlover wrote:

I neither stated or implied anything like what you’re trying to infer here. The pencil stroke is not the poet’s medium, words are.

You’re talking about subject matter, not the nature of the medium. I have made no claims about subject matter.

Who claimed this?

Do you mean only or both? And who are you talking to? This has nothing to do with anything I’ve said.

The human ear responds to a well-ordered rhythm, and the poet uses that fact to achieve an effect. `Anality’ has nothing to do with it.

Merely expressing an idea does not make it poetry.

They don’t have to be followed, but they cannot be ignored, and their usefulness cannot be dismissed. English speech tends to organize itself in a rough iambic beat because the words fit together that way and because the english ear likes to recieve it that way. Rhymes occur, because there are only so many patterns of sound. They can work for you, or against you, but they cannot be ignored. As I stated before, rhyme can help establish broader patterns of rhythm, which will also be pleasant to the ear.

The use of rhythm and rhyme are essential in this little joke:

Shake and shake the ketchup bottle,
None’ll come, and then a lot’ll.

The rhythm imitates the shaking of the bottle, and the sound of the rhyme imitates the sudden disastrous release of ketchup. If you try to convey the joke without the meter and rhyme, you don’t tell the joke at all.

In this hypnotic piece, the thum-thuming rhythm and the rhyme that matches it imitate the drum and fife that drive a soldier to die in battle:

Far and near and low and louder
On the roads of earth go by,
Dear to friends and food for powder,
Soldiers marching, all to die.

Now look at this:

A ball will bounce, but less and less.

The meter is a very regular iambic, and it imitates the rhythm of a ball bouncing. And notice that on top of the regular iambic beat there is a cadence. Each stressed syllable recieves less stress than the previous once, bouncing less and less just like the ball it describes. Without meter, you destroy this effect.

When Ajax strives some rock’s vast weight to throw

The established iambic pattern of this line emphasises the break in the iambic pattern, thus lending extra gravity to the three stressed syllables “rock’s vast weight”. The return to iambic relieves the tension of these heavily stressed syllables, the way Ajax is relieved when he has thrown the weight away.

Here’s an example of rhythm used in free verse:

A noiseless, patient spider
I marked whereon a little promontory he stood isolated
Marked how to explore the vacant, vast surrounding,
It launched forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself.

In the breezy rhythm of the first three lines, we percieve the movement of the spider in his vast environement. In the last lines, the poet flings the words `filament, filament, filament’ the way that the spider flings its silk.

Rhyming is a word game, and word games sharpen the wits. In the attempt to rhyme, a poet can discover ways to say more than he set out to say:

She was, within a narrow spectrum, bright,
Though few percieved the color of her light.

You could do without rhyme, and you could let your rhythm hang all out. It’s possible to produce a worthwhile poem this way. It would be more by luck than by craft, but if you refuse to acknowledge these powerful devices, probably you’re not all that interested in the craft to begin with.

stofsky wrote:

All art is artificial. Just as the view outside my window will never be a painting, ideas and emotions will never be spoken words. They are made of different stuff, though one may invoke the other. Poetics are the devices used to manipulate the language into invoking ideas and emotions. Poems are made up of the same stuff as ordinary language, and that stuff includes regular rhythm and rhyme. They certainly aren’t as artificial as the line breaks and spacial tricks used by E. E. Cummings, or the font games played by the Vortex crowd. Poetry is all artificial.

44

Very well put, hedra. Thank you.

It makes some sense to me.

I have some culinary training, but when I eat a reuben sandwich, I’m not conscious of the ratio of sauerkraut molecules to thousand islands dressing molecules… I’m simply enjoying how the flavours of each come together in my mouth (please excuse the food analogy, I missed lunch).

Anyway, on the topic of poetry, I wanted to make some points about free verse. Contrary to popular belief, free verse is not just words thrown on a page with line breaks inserted at the writer’s whim. Also, free verse is not defineable as the absence of rhyme or meter. Free verse is, in fact a poetic form (an old one now, really) which had it origin in the French form vers libre.

As a English form, free verse was a reaction against what was seen as the constipated meter and rhyme of late 19th-century Victorian verse. Free verse attempted to shake the essence of poetry loose. An enema, if you will.

A free verse poem normally started in a set meter, and then attempted to stretch or compress that meter, eventually breaking free of it. This process may, or may not, have been repeated a number of times in the course of the poem. The success or failure of the poem lay in whether or not the words, stripped of rhyme and meter, could still dance.

Worthy descendants and/or dabblers in free verse were H.D. and the Imagists, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams.

I may ramble on about modern, post-modern etc., poetry later.

45

True. It is not the ideas which poetry conveys, but the power of poetry to convey ideas which has made poets (Ovid, for example) and poetry feared throughout history.

Poetry uses language, certainly, but it uses it in a subversive manner. Poetry uses language in an attempt to bypass language. Poetry aims to enter the mind and change the way the mind perceives the world. Poetry is beautiful, seductive and dangerous to the status quo. This is where poetry and art become one.

I wouldn’t say that the spurning of rhyme and meter significantly decrease the chances of producing a good poem, or even a great one. What I would say is that without an awareness and firm grounding in the works of the past, a poet is more likely to become bogged down unnecessarily in territories where trails have already been blazed.

Yes, poetry is an art, and art is artificial. Yes, poets use poeticdevices to evoke emotions, etc. And yes, rhyme and meter are poetic devices. But they are not the only poetic devices. Many other exist: metaphor, assonance, onamatopoiea, to name just three. A poet has many tools available, and chooses the ones best suited to the poem he is working on.

In Ted Hughes’ Crow he does, occasionally use rhyme for effect, but most of the poems do not contain rhyme; and their rhythms are not metered, yet they do have strong, strong rhythm.

For those interested in reading the work of a living, breathing, amazing poet, I recommend Glass, Irony, and God by Anne Carson.

46

To be in control of the words or the rhythm?

I see. Perhaps you can reconcile this with the previous quote.

Specifically, that is exactly what you are claiming. In you later examples you note how the rhythm/meter/rhyme/whatever adds meaning to the words.

It disappoints me greatly that your “canvas” has size restrictions, or rather, that you limit your paint to a specific number of colors. Or, more to the point, it disappoints me greatly that your level of abstraction leaves off at r/m/r/w. A “nihilistic” poem, to use the term as such, would reject strict semantic meaning, r/m/r/w as well. Yet, at a certain level of abstraction there would still be a meaning. If I had to rigidly define poetry it would be “abstract semantic holism.” What you desribe is a branch of poetry referred to as “songwriting.” That is, it is meant to be heard, not read. While songwriting logically would be a subset of poetry, it is not the only type.

47

'Scuse me folks – my meter’s running.

48

aynrandlover wrote:

Both. But I think the antecedent is clear.

It’s not clear what it is you don’t understand. Surely you don’t think a poem is not beautiful unless the poet’s penmanship is?

Lines and colors make up a picture. They add meaning to a picture. Does that mean we’re talking about what the actual picture is when we talk about how line and color work? This is not about subject matter, this is about how words may be artfully brought together to achieve an effect. You asked for examples of how rhythm and rhyme are used to achieve an effect, and I have provided amply. So, now you’re using this to bolster your equivocation?

These restrictions you mention are not analogous to those in poetry at all. Your pallate is as big as your vocabulary. Your canvas is as large as necessary.

No, the analogy is more that not all colors fit together. Not all paints can be made in all colors, and not all canvases will take all paints. Not just any shapes flung together on a canvas will make the picture you want. Not just any colors will achieve the mood you want. Not just any brush will paint the line you want. To make a painting, you must know your colors, your shapes, your brushes, your paints and your canvas. You have to know what they can do and what they can’t do. You make brilliant compromises to get around the limitations of the medium. That’s where the art comes in.

In poetry, the meaning of the words is not your only tool of expression. If it were, you could just write a couple of paragraphs saying just what you wanted to say, and no one would have invented poetry at all. Poetry is also made up of sounds. Words evoke ideas, which may evoke feelings, but the sounds of those words evoke feelings, too. If the sound of your words does not match the feelings you mean to express, then the poem is at best weak. Or worse, your sound could contradict your meaning – which is useful if you meant for it to happen, such as in in these lines:

I have a rendezvous with Death
When Spring brings back blue days and fair.

But it’s disastrous if you aren’t trying to be ironic. Some soft words have a hard sound, and vicious words are often gentle to the ears. But the poet can bolster or ameliorate these effects with some effort, by making clever compromises, giving harsh sounds soft places to land, or by dropping harmless words with a thud.

The poet must know how the elements of the medium fit together, and how they don’t. Words don’t go in just any order, and the most obvious order is often the stuff of dry, boring paragraphs about how to clean a fish tank. Yet, even within the limitations imposed by the English language, words can together in a dizzying variety of ways. So the poet can tweak the sound of the poem to fit the requirements without violating the language. It’s not always easy. If it seems easy, chances are you could be doing it better.

Know your medium; know what it will and won’t do; make clever compromises. That’s the art.

You’re just being gnostic.

No, I haven’t even gotten to that part yet. I’m talking about discrete elements that occur the language, and which are bone and sinew to poems. Songs are types of poems that are designed to imitate or accompany music. That’s a couple of levels of abstraction away from what I’m talking about now.

Dealing with the sounds of words is the core of poetry, not just something you can do with it when you’re not busy trying to be gnostic. Poetry developed as an art long before we had writing. Without writing, the sound of poetry had to get the point across, because you couldn’t read back over it, and it had to make it memorable, because otherwise it was lost. Just because the possibilities of the written medium have been brought to play on poems doesn’t mean you can just toss out the core of the art, or treat it like a side issue. It’s still about making emotions with the sounds of words, and making the author’s words ring in the listeners’ head. It is never enough just to appeal to the mind. Staid essays will get the message across to the mind much better than a poem. A poem appeals to the mind, and backs it up by wrenching the gut. Sound bypasses the mind, and goes right for the viscera. That’s what gives poetry its power.

Both you and stofsky seem to think I’m arguing for form verse, which I haven’t been. Yet. I’ve just been trying to dispel certain misunderstandings about meter and rhyme. They are elements of the art which must be respected. Rhythm especially is essential, and meter is its measure. Rhyme is useful or problematic, according to the skill of the poet.

Now, I’ll turn to form. All the great free verse poets cut their teeth on form. Probably somebody in high school told you that form constrains you, and keeps you from expressing yourself, and that the person who rejects it is more enlightened to those fuddy-duddies who use it. But the truth is that Shakespeare didn’t write sonnets or songs or blank verse just because he was a moron, or because he wasn’t hip enough to let it all hang out. He did it because the forms have power. Each form has its own kind of power, its own effect on the poet’s message. Songs are light and lilting, sonnets are ponderous. Each form exists because it gets the job done, like the pattern of a bird’s wingstrokes – one-two-glide, one-two-glide – like a flock of birds in flight that breaks apart now, and now comes together.

This is not a refutation of free verse. Free verse, or fluid form, exists for a reason, too. It achieves different things. But it doesn’t make it easier to express yourself; it makes it harder, because you are giving up the beautiful things that the form does for you. You must find your direction without a compass, try to dance without music. It can be done, and there are great advantages to doing it. But if you haven’t learned first to write songs or sonnets, then you will never have been forced to learn the minute quirks of your medium. You will be cutting with a dull, untempered blade, and will be capable of nothing but crude hacking, and will work up a sweat just to make a mess of things, and maybe the blade will break. Learning form will fire and quench and polish and keen your wit.

There is no answer to the question of whether free verse is better or worse than form verse. The question misses the point, and anyone who picks one side over the other misses the point. I’m not trying to tell people who have eschewed form that they have simply got it backwards. I’m just trying to dispell the myths that harden people’s minds against it.

49

Round and round we go.
Gnostic? Hahaha. I’d ask for more elaboration there but for fear that I’d get an answer :wink:

Really, though, I’m not sure that I agree with you that the poet must necessarily master meter to create a beautiful poem on purpose(even if meter is then not used deliberately). That is, I am not of a school of thought which dictates an essential background is required for creation.

But hmm, I do see myself running into some problems here in furthering this argument.

Must pause further commenting and return with a conclusion later…

50

I can’t disagree with this. There are poems by Ted Hughes which follow me, rattling like tin cans tied to the bumpers of newly-weds’ cars; lines of Pound’s which scream at me like cherry buds cracking into blossom; some days, Yeats is an incessant pneumatic yammer in my ears; my eyes cross trying to follow Neruda’s hummingbird flight.

To reiterate, free verse was a specific critter. And it died a while back – at least fifty year, or so, ago, Johnny Angel, me boy. Let’s use the term you used earlier, fluid verse. There’s a lot of drivel written under that heading. There was also a lot of drivel written under the heading of iambic pentameter.

Ah, form. You can’t build a house without a frame. But (oh, again, and always, but) there are many forms. And poets need not, should not, be restricted to any one, or even any few, not even the tried and true. Neither should poets dismiss the past; language is the the medium of poetry, and the history of poetry is one long conversation as old as language itself – to ignore this is to talk only to oneself.

Yes, form is important. A poem cannot exist without form. But the old forms aren’t the only forms. Personally, I do believe the old forms are dead forms, and that to try write in them is akin to attempting to re-animate a corpse. So, if the old forms are dead, what recourse do poets have? They must create new forms. Create.

And what is their raw material? Language. The sound of the language they hear and speak everyday. The language which reflects the society, the world, in which they live. The world in which we live. This is where their new forms are found. And that world is changing more rapidly every day.

This is reflected in our poetry, in the forms of it. Some forms have an existence the length of a single poem, some the length of a sequence, some the length of a book… Reminds me of Ecclesiastes (a great poem, by the way), “Vanity of vanities,” sayeth the Preacher, “all is vanity.”

What I’m saying is this: Form is an intrinsic property of a poem. I do not choose fluid verse over form – I choose poetry over drivel.

51

nothamlet wrote:

Strictly speaking, the vers libre was a movement in the late 19th century. But hardly anybody uses the term free verse in reference only to that, or even only to the free verse movement in english. But some people are very sticky on this point, as you apparently are. So, some like the term fluid verse, which is actually more descriptive, and in fact better proscriptive. Rather than advocating verse that’s merely `free’ as though there was no rule that needed to be followed, fluid verse suggests poems that flow, but do so according to the laws and logic of flow.

There is a sense in which every poem has a form, sure – a poem must follow some verbal, conceptual and audible logic. But it’s neither necessary nor useful to broaden the use of the term `form’ to include every possible instance of it. The term is useful for referring to a subset of definable shapes that poems can take – those with regular meters, or syllable patterns, or rhyme patterns, or sound patterns.

52

some POets OFten TRY wriTING
One does not say wriTING

onLY One does not say onLY.

Every is properly trisyllabic but we scrunch sounds.

also hopeLESS is right out

One must focus on the proper placement of polysyllabic words.

try

Some poets often try a writing style
It’s called iambic meter. It is tough.
With stress on ev’ry second syllable,
This practice builds a rhythm that is smooth.
This discipline is very hard to learn.
I’m hopeless that I ever will succeed.

53

I don’t think iambic rhyming is smooth, but sing-song, except in blank verse or when it is broken up by different rhyming schemes, as Shakespeare often did. And since it’s the natural speaking emphasis in English not that tough.

I enjoy limericks, which are not serious poems, but do follow a strict rhyming, anapestic, and syllabification scheme. In spite of the strict form, they are light poems and easy to compose. I’ve written scores and here is one of them for your amusement.

There once was a man from Nantucket,
Whose corn was so high he could shuck it.
He once grew a huge stalk
At which others would gawk,
'Til a ladder he climbed, then said, “----- it!”

Now I know that you may think me naughty,
And impute terminology bawdy,
But in truth, as it’s said, it’s just all in your head;
For he needed the ladder to pluck it!

So if limericks, or prose, you’re perusing,
And you don’t find your readings amusing,
May I humbly suggest
You submit to this test:
Were the blasphemies of your own choosing?

54

barbitu8 wrote:

It’s not clear what you mean by sing-song', given that you're distinguishing it from smooth’ and it’s not clear what you could mean by broken up by different rhyming schemes' which would make Shakespeare's poems less sing-song’.

55

I agree. Whenever I read a modern rhymeing poem it sounds like Dr. Suess.

56

Shakespeare did not write all iambics. He used different accent themes, for effect, to express different moods and emotions. He sometimes rhymed for effect, but usually not. I cannot express in words the difference I feel between smooth and sing-song, except that if a poem is continuously iambic it sounds sing-song to me. I don’t think there are any noteworthy poems of any length which are totally iambic.

57

even seven wrote:

You’re reading the wrong ones, then.

barbitu8 wrote:

I can’t think of a Shakespeare poem that isn’t iambic. Some of his prose is iambic, but as far as I recall, he always used iambic meter in poems. Also, this doesn’t address what you said about Shakespeare’s rhyme scheme, which is a different issue from his meter.

You must be referring to the dialogue in his plays, because in his poems he always rhymed.

But sing-song is smooth, as opposed to the rough cadances that are used to break up a sing-song sound.

Nothing requires an iambic poem to be iambic in every syllable. Every poet who uses the meter breaks it up with substitutions. That doesn’t mean it’s something other than an iambic meter, just because substitutions are made.

58

firstly, I just feel inclined to state that while the internet is thick with people debating over one thing or another, debate about the necessity of meter is something you don’t see everyday, and seeing in pursued heatedly and in an educated fashion really adds to my faith in humanity. For the record.

That said, to our thread-starter Qwerty:

I’m going to curb my first impulse here, which is to say something like, it seems like you’ve already made up your mind and are not interested in learning anything from these fine people here. Instead I will answer this suggestion seriously, and hope it is given some thought.

Essentially, talking means orally putting words together to convey a meaning BY MEANS OF using the words’ literal and informal definitions. You can say “I’m going to the store” or “God is a wax elephant” – you are still just talking because you are coveying the fact that you are going to the store by using the listener’s understanding of the word “store” to mean a building where things are for sale or “elephant” to mean a large mammal native to certain parts of africa and asia… etc. You are also relying on the listener’s understanding of grammar and context, but you are not relying on what the words SOUND LIKE to make a point, or what associations the cause.

Poetry is putting words together to convey meaning by means of using words literal and informal defintions AS WELL AS using words associatively and AS WELL AS by using sound to evoke meaning. Whether or not poets use meter or rhyme, the still choose each word individually. They carefully weigh how words sound alone and next to each other, and use the way they sound to evoke feelings, which are a part or all of the poem’s of overall meaning. The also take into account what words evoke what emotions associatively. Words like “father” evoke a host of different highly emotional responses from different people.

With or with the obvious trappings or meter and rhyme, poetry conveys meaning in MORE ways that speech.

This doesn’t mean it always has to be effective, or even good. Poetry is unfairly mystifyed in our society. If a poem is bad, it is still a poem – it’s just a bad poem.

The purpose of poetry (and whether it is good or bad is tied up how well it fills what you consider its purpose) is a subjective question that philosophers have long pondered, like asking what the purpose of art is. But now at least you should be able to tell poems from mere words – it is an issue of the WAY they try to covey something, not what is coveyed, or how well it is conveyed. And since you seem to say that words in speech “can share an experience and incorporate imagery, metaphors, etc… and it might sound fantastic” maybe you might find it within yourself to look at some poems you otherwise would have dismissed… with neither regular meter nor rhyme… and find them fantastic, too.

No cynicism or sarcasm intended: truly hope so.

–Bailey

59

I don’t deny that non-metered/non-rhyming can express an idea, experience, etc. Its just not what I would call poetry. For example, many good authors incorporate symbolism, imagegery, metaphors, similes, share experiences, express ideas and emotions… in books.

What I’m saying that when “poetry” has no restrictions in structure, it stops being poetry.

60

What do you mean by restrictions in structure? I’ll accept that a poem cannot be a house (other than in a metaphorical sense), and I’ll accept that a poem cannot be a newspaper article, or a treatise on symbolic logic; but I won’t accept, for instance, that a poem cannot be a novel (I know of a wonderful sequence of poetry, Whylah Falls, by a Nova Scotia poet, George Elliot Clarke, for which a case could be made that it is also a novel).

As far as restrictions in the structure of individual poems goes, though: If you are claiming that Neruda’s Odes are not poetry because they do not have a constant meter or rhyme scheme (have you read Neruda?); or that because Eliot’s (have you read him?) The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock happens to rhyme, it is a poem, while e.e. cummings’ (read him?) La Guerre, or Buffalo Bill’s / defunct…, because they don’t rhyme, aren’t poems… if this is how you decide what is and isn’t poetry, I cannot understand why you posted your question in the first place.

If on the other hand, your question was serious and you truly want to know if apoem must rhyme or be bound in chains of meter, than I suggest you start reading the major and minor poets of this century. Try William Carlos Williams, try Marianne Moore, try Pound and Eliot and cummings. Read Frost and Hughes and Heaney and Plath. Charles Wright, Mark Strand, Anne Carson, Al Purdy, Milton Acorn.

Read. Hear the language in your gut and in your balls. This is the only sure way to know what is and what isn’t poetry.